Thoughts on: The Lie of the Land

It’s not that Toby Whithouse is a shit writer necessarily. He’s not. He’s turned in some great scripts in his time. School Reunion was delightful. As was The God Complex. The Vampires of Venice and last season’s Under the Lake/Before the Flood were enjoyable. Even A Town Called Mercy was good in parts, if a bit dull. But watching this made me grateful that it’s Chris Chibnall who’s getting the showrunner gig after Moffat leaves, and not Whithouse, even as I’m beginning to regret even Chibnall’s appointment. It really was quite a shambles, and a dishonest and patronising shambles at that.

Don’t get me wrong. This was fun, if nothing else. It’s watchable. It has its tickly moments interspersed between the disappointing failure to successfully execute anything remotely approaching an interesting idea. The monks subjugating the human race by beaming fake news into everyone’s brains. That was fun. The Doctor bloviating, very convincingly, at Bill about how the election of Donald Trump has reduced him to supporting a malevolent alien domination of the human race. That was very fun. The Doctor faux-regenerating. Fun. Missy lying atop a grand piano and batting her heavy lids at the Doctor as he bounces ideas off her. Fun. Nardole. Much fun. Very amuse. And “fun” is something at least. One of the most important considerations when I’m mulling over my opinion on a Doctor Who episode for these reviews is “Aside from everything else, did I enjoy watching it?” But “fun”  isn’t enough. Because The Curse of the Black Spot was “fun”. Victory of the Daleks was “fun”. But “fun” didn’t stop those episodes from being eminently forgettable.

No, this episode’s real failure was that it had so much potential and so many interesting ideas to play with, but that it supremely failed to do anything interesting with them. The story we were teased with in trailers and synopses, and the story this episode looked like it was going to tell for the first fifteen minutes, was genuinely interesting. The entire world, including the Doctor, has been brainwashed by alien invaders and only Bill can see the truth. That was interesting. That was outright riveting. So why didn’t we get it? Moffat and/or the BBC knew that that story was far more interesting than “the Doctor and Bill attempt to overthrow an alien occupation”, which is why the former, not the latter, was the story this episode was sold as in all the promotional material. Instead, the episode abruptly dispensed with the story it knew was the more interesting idea after fifteen minutes and proceeded inexplicably to tell a hackneyed story about the Doctor and Bill boringly leading a boring resistance against the boring Monks, with Missy thrown in for unnecessary good measure (Missy was still delightful, though, don’t get me wrong).

And it really was quite brilliant for fifteen minutes. The bleak, soul-crushing oppressiveness of the Monks’ take on 1984 was captured really well. The way the human race was subjugated through mind control, the way the monks have been manipulating humanity’s memory of its history, the Doctor’s chilling propaganda broadcasts—it was all done brilliantly (god, that was such a promising pre-titles sequence). And the climactic confrontation between Bill and the Doctor on the prison hulk? Wow. That soared. Pearl Mackie and Peter Capaldi were at their ecstatic, spellbinding best, and I’ve no hesitation in calling it one of the best scenes of Series 10 so far, if not of the Capaldi era. I didn’t even mind the faux-regeneration. Unnecessary and frivolous, perhaps, but it was the exhilarating climax of an incredibly emotional and captivating confrontation between the two leads, and it worked. It’s just a shame it was the rude segue into the much more mundane remaining two-thirds of the episode, rather than its climax.

But the other good idea this episode failed to follow through on was any conception of the Monks as anything other than nondescript alien occupiers. Sorry, I know I praised how the Monks were portrayed last week, but they’re back to being boring again this week. I’ll admit that the mind control was cool. I’ll admit that the idea of the Monks ruling the Earth by beaming fake news into everyone’s heads was cool, and it might have made for a much better episode if it had been given some proper exposition and worldbuilding. But the thing is, you could literally substitute any other hideous-looking alien race for the Monks in this episode, because the Monks in this episode bore next to no relation to the Monks from Extremis or The Pyramid at the End of the World. They had precisely zero lines, and I can’t help thinking that Whithouse wasn’t really interested in writing a story about the Monks Steven Moffat had conceived, but was rather just using the Monks as convenient placeholder aliens for the story he really wanted to tell (unsuccessfully) about 1984 with mind control. As Phil Sandifer justly pointed out, the Monks who control the human race through mind control have no conceptual connection to the Monks who create elaborate, faultless simulations of the Earth and all the people in it in order to determine the best way to conquer it.

What exactly happened to that idea anyway? It was nowhere to be seen in this episode, and the simulation technology was used for a completely different purpose in the previous episode. I still don’t know why the Monks didn’t, as we were led to believe they would, just use the information gained from their simulations to determine the most effective way to conquer the Earth, and then go ahead and conquer it. I don’t understand why they bothered with fiddly psychic links if they could literally just conquer the Earth. And I don’t understand why their simulations didn’t see that their mind control technology wasn’t going to work on Bill, and that as a result she would be their downfall. That’s because it didn’t make sense. Each of Steven Moffat, Peter Harness and Toby Whithouse were writing about a slightly different villain in slightly different stories, with the result that the whole is disunited and incoherent. Not so much a chain novel as a game of Chinese whispers where the thing ends up a completely different creature from what it started out as.

The other result of the inconsistent writing of the Monks was that the story actually omitted to tell us who they were. We were told all about their great powers and what they could do, but nothing about who they were and what they wanted. Why, exactly, were they interested in ruling the Earth? One does not simply decide to subjugate an entire planet because one feels like it. If one was to go to that much trouble one would be expected to have a good reason. But it really did look like they conquered the Earth out of either whimsy or a sadistic desire simply to oppress. It didn’t look like they were taking advantage of their absolute dominion of the planet by, you know, picking some less Spartan living arrangements or anything absolute rulers would be expected to do with their absolute power. Given that they didn’t speak in this episode, we’ve really got nothing else to go on. Nor were we told who they were—there were some interesting seeds of ideas, like what they said about taking the form of corpses because, to them, humans look like corpses. But nope, nothing. We’re left to speculate.

I haven’t even mentioned arguably this episode’s biggest sin yet, which was that awful resolution. Look, I’m not one of those tedious fans who retch at any suggestion of feels and sentimentality in Doctor Who. Anyone who’s read my reviews before could tell you that that’s absolutely not me. I usually revel in the feels and frequently rebuke the show for not being sincere enough in its deployment of emotion (see my review of Face the Raven). But emotionally-driven resolutions actually have to mean something to work. There has to be some measure of emotional investment put into them to get the narrative and emotional dividends. You can’t just throw them in wherever you want as a convenient narrative cure-all that excuses you from actually coming up with an intelligent resolution. This was the laziest and most undercooked use of the already overused “power of love” resolution that I’ve seen on Doctor Who yet. It was patronising, and it left the audience cold as a result. And, other than anything else, this was absolutely not the ending this trilogy deserved. At the end of Extremis we were anticipating that this trilogy would end with the Doctor finding a way to beat the Monks’ simulations in an incredibly exciting and unexpected way. Instead we got Bill projecting images of her mum onto a computer screen. We deserved better.

Rating: 5/10.

Thoughts on: Under the Lake / Before the Flood

Two-parters are a funny thing. Regular readers will probably be familiar with my standard paean to the two-part format for Doctor Who stories: the format gives the story time and space to breathe; if employed well, it allows for a more fleshed-out and involving narrative; it allows for the kind of quality plot and character development that a single 45-minute episode story simply doesn’t accommodate. I don’t think two-parters are inherently better than the single-episode format—there are a handful of standout episodes that have utilised the 45-minute time-frame perfectly—but I certainly think that the two-part format facilitates better script-writing on the part of writers not limited to setting up, developing and concluding a story (a Doctor Who story, no less) in the space of 45 minutes. No surprises then that almost all my favourite stories are two-parters. I suppose it’s much like when an assessment gives you a word limit of 1,000 and you spend three hours chopping up and amputating large chunks of your perfectly-crafted essay, leaving an uncomfortably succinct rump as your submission.

The point of a two-part story is that it’s a story in two parts. Put like that, it’s patronisingly obvious. But I feel as though it’s easy to lose sight of that point when there’s a week’s wait in the middle. My praise for Under the Lake was qualified when I jotted down my “first thoughts” last week. I thought it didn’t quite measure up to many of the other very similar stories it was consciously aping. Likewise, I felt a bit underwhelmed by this week’s episode. I felt that it was something of a feeble follow-up to wait a whole week for. But that was just it. It felt feeble because I waited a whole week to see it. Between last week’s episode and this week’s, anticipation, speculation and excitement had been swirling around my head, festering and putting me in the kind of state of mind I might possess going into a new James Bond movie or Harry Potter book, rather than Act 2 of a play, which is essentially what the second episode of a two-part Doctor Who story is. On their own, Under the Lake and Before the Flood are neither the stuff of screenwriting excellence (for Doctor Who, at least), but, watched together, they’re something quite special. A two-parter is a play of two acts, which are supposed to be watched together. That’s what I’ve taken from this experience, and that’s what I think ought to be kept in mind when forming impressions of two-part stories.

So in general I think this story is highly successful. Given the ideas it plays with, it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be. The ghosts are undoubtedly the highlight of this story: freaky, macabre, spine-tingling apparitions realised astoundingly well, just like the Mummy from Mummy on the Orient Express last year, another paranormal creature featured in Doctor Who. Everything about them is perfect, and, although I don’t have any under-twelves conveniently at hand to confirm this, I’m sure the show succeeded yet again spectacularly in its unrelenting mission to send as many children as possible to bed trembling. The blackened, hollowed-out eyes, the silently-whispering mouths, the eerie, zombie-like movement; it was all perfect. In addition, I thought the concept of going back in time to investigate the genesis of the ghosts was just a brilliant sci-fi spin on a ghost story. This is Doctor Who seizing the ghost genre and doing something profoundly different and distinctive with it. It’s all carried out to distinction, making for a highly atmospheric, irresistibly suspenseful and creepy screenplay.

Toby Whithouse displays his usual skill for crafting diverse and believable characters in this script. For such a large cast, it’s genuinely impressive that none of the characters were wasted, but Whithouse has managed to pull it off. Actually, a qualifier to that—the only character I thought was poorly written was Pritchard, the greedy corporate rep, who felt a bit like a lazily-assembled constellation of certain prejudiced ideas about business people typically harboured by persons of a particular political persuasion. Other than that, the supporting characters were all well-written and memorable (testament to which is that I can actually remember all their names). In particular, the deaf Cass was easily one the best aspects of this story. I’ll hear no talk of tokenism—Cass was a brilliant character who wasn’t wasted by any means, and easily the strongest of the supporting characters. Her relationship with her interpreter, Lund, was just lovely. And I loved the scene where Cass was being stalked by Moran’s ghost, oblivious to the ringing of the axe scraping across the metal floor; brilliant suspense.

We haven’t seen any conspicuous indication of a series arc yet as such (somewhat to my disappointment), but I think we’re seeing some very subtle foreshadowing of what’s to come later in Series 9, especially surrounding the circumstances of Clara’s coming departure. It’s clear the Doctor has been worrying himself over Clara’s alarming new-found thirst for adventure and danger, her troublingly reckless pursuit of an adrenaline hit. This builds on her character development in Series 8, but it seems to have become more acute since then, as though Danny Pink’s death has seen her throw care and caution to the wind, such to cause the Doctor to begin worrying about her. There’s a heavy suggestion that we’re going to see tragedy strike. The Doctor’s going to lose another one, it seems. It was much the same in Series 7a, where Amy’s tragic end was quite un-subtly foreshadowed. At the same time, I think we’re starting to see a pattern in respect of the “changing history to save a loved one” motif—that’s the second time that idea has cropped up in two stories; added to that the fact that the title of the final episode of the series is the very suggestive “Hell Bent”, one wonders whether the finale will involve the Doctor attempting to recover a dead Clara by changing time. Something to speculate about, anyway.

Some final thoughts. The Fisher King was a brilliant creature, a towering, terrifying skeletal figure, but somewhat underused, I think. It would have been great to see some of his purportedly terrible power, but at least he went out like a boss. The pretitles sequence to Before the Flood, in which the Doctor breaks the fourth wall and pontificates on the bootstrap paradox, was wonderful, but I thought it might’ve worked better if it weren’t put right at the beginning of the episode—perhaps it might’ve worked better closer to the end, if not at the very end, as a kind of contemplative endnote. I just adored Prentis, who couldn’t have constituted a more incongruous contrast to the menacing, nightmarish figure of his ghost. He was just hilarious. By the way, is it just me or did Doctor Who just indulge in a bit of very smutty innuendo in Prentis’s tantalising offer to the Doctor to peruse “a selection of items you can oppress me with”? It wouldn’t be the first time, actually.

Rating: 8/10.

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Quote of the week:

“Someone get me a selection of flags.”

Cue Clara giving the Doctor a look that says “I can’t believe you actually just said that.”

First thoughts: Under the Lake

Warning: spoilers ahead.

• I really enjoyed this. It was a refreshing change of pace from the sweeping, epic scale of the opening two-parter; a more low-key and intimate story, but, at the same time, still genuinely thrilling and gripping Doctor Who.
• That said, compared with the very non-traditional storytelling of the opening two-parter, this episode is very traditional Doctor Who. The base-under-siege is a familiar staple of the show, and this episode couldn’t help call to the mind of any Doctor Who fan similar base-under-siege stories in the new series like 42, The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit and The Waters of Mars. It feels a lot like each of those stories, and comparisons are inevitably going to be made. Don’t get me wrong, Under the Lake is a fantastic exemplar of the base-under-siege format, but, when looked at beside those stories, it falls just a bit flat.
• But, I hasten to remind myself, we’ve only seen the first part of a two-part story. A great deal hinges on how well the second half turns out. The trailer makes it look amazing: scaling out from an anomalous incident in an underwater base to something of far greater moment. So I can’t really form a judgment about this one until I’ve seen the whole picture. As it stands, the second episode could either entrench this two-parter as an instant classic, or, if it fails to satisfactorily expand the plot and the narrative, leave it an enjoyable but unremarkable story that will be forgotten by this time in the next series, which is basically my opinion of the strikingly similar 42. But, just from the trailer, I’m confident that Whithouse will follow through with an absolute corker. I absolutely love the conceit of going back in time to discover how ghosts came to be, and I’m a great deal more excited for Before the Flood than I was for this episode.

• These ghosts are seriously freaky. They’re astoundingly well-realised. If I were ten years younger (maybe eight, at a push), I’m sure I’d have gone to bed with the covers pulled resolutely over my head. Those blackened, hollowed-out eyes are the stuff of prepubescent nightmares, and the silently whispering mouths are the perfect final bone-chilling touch.
• That cliffhanger was a belter. The Doctor, desiccated old Scot that he is, is maybe the freakiest of all the ghosts. Great buildup, too; my thoughts when Clara’s eyes were widening in shock when she saw who the new ghost was went something like: “Nope. Nope. Nope. NOPE. NOPE! Not him! Surely not! Oh, God, it’s him. He’s dead. Again.”
• Cass was a great addition to the cast. The inclusion of a deaf character who communicates by signing always carried the risk of being a novelty, a hollow and embarrassing overture to the “minority representation” crowd, but Cass was unarguably one of the best things about this episode. She was easily the strongest of the fairly large cast of supporting characters (testament to which is that she’s the only one of the supporting characters whose name I can remember), and she proved vital in translating the ghosts’ silent mantra.
• The show’s doing that ominous foreshadowing of the companion’s death thing again. Remember the not-so-subtle hinting that Amy was going to die all throughout Series 7a? I don’t know how to interpret the Doctor’s increasing concern over Clara’s worrisome thrill-seeking and recklessness other than as foreshadowing her forthcoming demise.

• And just when I was starting to really like Clara again. Compared to Series 8, Clara so far hasn’t been given all that much to say or do (which is probably for the best; Series 8 was far too Clara-heavy at the expense of Capaldi), but, from what we have seen and heard from her, I think they’ve finally got the writing of her character right. She’s a genuinely likable character again. It’s as though they’ve finally struck the right balance, the sweet spot in between the charming but generic character devoid of distinctive personality that was Clara in Series 7, and the annoying, self-consumed drama queen that she was (at times) in Series 8.
• Maybe the one main thing I would criticise about this episode is that too much reliance was placed on verbal exposition. Too many scenes of people standing in a room and talking. These sequences are tedious, puncture the atmosphere, and lose the viewers’ attention. When there’s as much of it as there was in this episode, it seems like disproportionately more of the episode was taken up by these sequences in one’s impression of the episode than in reality, which, I’m sure, when you’re a writer, is not what you want viewers to take away from your stories.
• I really appreciated the humour of this episode. A selection of my favourite bits: Clara going for a high-five after she and the Doctor walked in on an overturned room, and the Doctor giving her a strange look that said “what a freak”; the Doctor assuming he can speak sign and becoming flustered when he realises he can’t; the faces Clara makes every time the Doctor says something inappropriate; the Doctor being reduced to carrying flashcards to remind him of how to conduct himself in a socially acceptable manner; “It was my fault, I should have known you didn’t live in Aberdeen.”

Thoughts on: School Reunion

The highlight of this episode was its character focus. School Reunion brought back iconic Classic Who companion Sarah-Jane Smith and explored the dynamics of the Doctor-Companion relationship. The heartwarming reunion of the Doctor with Sarah-Jane (and K9) ought to have brought a broad smile to any Classic fan’s face. As should the very entertaining and telling interplay between Sarah-Jane and her successor, Rose. It’s clear that the Doctor’s companions, particularly the ones with whom he forms the strongest relationships, like these two, are very protective of him and jealous of their special bond with the Doctor, thus the rivalry between Rose and Sarah-Jane which played out almost like that between a wife and an ex-wife, as the episode indicated. They all think they’re special; they all think they have something special with the Doctor, and are somewhat resentful and put out when they realise the Doctor has had dozens of companions with whom he has been as close to before and after them—as Rose’s interrogation of the Doctor about her not being his first showed. They oughtn’t be so surprised, though. As the Doctor made touchingly clear, it’s too painful for him to stay with one companion for too long, to grow too attached, because he has to face watching them wither and die, and having his heart broken in the process, as he continues, ageless and eternal. This emotional dynamic between the Doctor and his companions was explored really excellently and movingly by this episode, and constituted the highlight of an otherwise mediocre story.

The episode also explored the effect travelling with the Doctor has on his companions’ lives. Sarah-Jane had evidently bottled up a lot of resentment towards the Doctor for leaving her behind. He had shown her the unbelievable, done the extraordinary with her and profoundly changed her life… and then, in her words, he “dumped” her. Back to the dull, dreary monotony of ordinary life on Earth, after all that. I think the Doctor underestimates how profoundly he affects the lives of his companions, such that he’s unwittingly wont to leave them permanently affected when he parts company with them. I don’t think the original series gave this aspect of the Doctor-Companion dynamic the attention it merited, and it’s refreshing to see that the revived series is more sensitive to the character dynamics in this respect, not only with Sarah-Jane but with subsequent companions, Rose especially. We seem to be already seeing how significantly Rose has been affected by her travels with the Doctor, as she seems to have become infatuated with him. At the end she seems immoderately put out by the prospect of Mickey’s joining them aboard the TARDIS. Compare with the end of World War Three in Series 1 when she was scolding the Doctor for not “allowing” Mickey to come aboard. She sees herself and the Doctor as having something special, love even, and Mickey as being an intruder on their special, private relationship. This will end in heartbreak.

The episode also did a good job of exploring the Doctor’s character more deeply. Apart from exploring his relationship with his companions, and the way he feels about becoming too close to them, as discussed above, the episode also delved intriguingly into the darker side of the Doctor’s character:

Finch: “Fascinating. Your people were peaceful to the point of indolence. You seem to be something new. Would you declare war on us, Doctor?”
Doctor: “I’m so old now. I used to have so much mercy. You get one warning. That was it.”

And also where the Doctor was tempted almost to join sides with the Krillitanes, tempted by the lure of absolute power, which his reason and experience tells him should not be wielded by anyone, not even the most noble-intentioned, but yet he’s tempted nonetheless. This is a far cry from the eternal goody-goody peacemaker that was the Doctor of Classic Who. We see again how the Doctor has changed since we last saw him in San Francisco in faux-Edwardian garb and long black curls. One of the revived series’ most successful motifs is exploring the way the Time War has affected the Doctor. It’s a compelling aspect of the revived series’ Doctor’s characterisation which, for me at least, never gets old (and was one reason why I didn’t like the way the events of the Time War were reversed in The Day of the Doctor). I’ve heard some say that these little glimpses we get from Ten, like here and more infamously in The Waters of Mars, show that Ten was potentially the darkest and most complex of all the Doctor’s incarnations. I’m inclined to think there’s something in that observation, and Ten’s usual irrepressible joviality, if anything, makes it all the more compelling a theory.

To say something about the plot, I’m inclined to think that, while admittedly it was not the main focus of this highly character-focussed episode, it rather let down the quality of the episode. To say the least, the plot consisted of very unimaginative, even trite, writing. The monsters, the Krillitane, were badly designed and were generally treated poorly by the production, although I’ll admit that their concept was quite interesting and had a lot of potential. For this reason I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to their being brought back, although something fresh and interesting needs to be found to do with them, and, for goodness’ sake, change their form (at least that can actually be done). I feel like, thus far at least, Series 2 of Doctor Who has been more self-consciously a children’s show than Series 1. In this episode, this was manifest in the rubbish and simplistic plot surrounding the poorly-designed Krillitane, and in the depiction of schoolteachers as ugly shape-shifting bat-like monsters, something we all suspected as children and a children’s fantasy Doctor Who was obviously indulging. I mean, that’s not necessarily a bad idea in itself, but the way it was pitched squarely to children seems like lazy writing and production in that it lets the producers get away with pleasing the lower standards of children rather than creating something of genuine quality that all ages can appreciate.

I couldn’t find anywhere to fit these last minor points, but I think Anthony Head, or Uther Pendragon, as I know him, was superb as Mr Finch. He’s electric as the King of Camelot, and he was suitably intimidating and menacing as a giant bat in human form. He’s a great actor. And finally, I found the scene where Rose and Sarah-Jane were splitting their sides laughing at the Doctor together just gorgeous. Great writing, that bit—I was actually grinning broadly as I was watching. I wonder if this is what all the Doctor’s companions do when they meet?

Rating: 9/10.